Max Kaisler

October 2007

Max Kaisler is a seventeen-year-old high school senior from San Diego, California. She has been writing poetry since fifth grade when her Language Arts teacher made the class memorize a poem every week. Max began reading her poetry publicly this last year, following a summer poetry course in Idyllwild under the direction of accomplished poet Brendan Constantine. This year her work was published for the first time in Falling Star Magazine.

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concession speech

The trees by the canyon have begun saluting me as I pass, my skin paper-like and pale, like theirs; they know I grieve like them too, in both directions, with slow sap.
We are militant in our mourning; at somber attention we wash our eyes, knot the stiff nets of the street with our teeth.

The days are cold around here and I have given up on the reasoning that hands and street lamps are enough to warm us anymore. Everything is a memory from a carpeted room, with the lights of a bedside candle-show.

I understand that you are divine when you crush the air around you.
Divine like I felt in the dark bedroom with paper roses plastered to its walls.
I mourned in both directions, toward the window and the night.
But I feel the canvas splitting — two hands.

A few hours ago, a flock of trees took bayonets in hand,
crossing freeways and estuaries to march on your kitchen door.
A white forest of birds died at the drive-thru tonight, lay down on the pavement beneath the pick-up window and refused to live.
The grass would not grow facing the ocean today.

And pages from tomorrow’s news will blanket the sea, their watery texts spanning the whole cold Pacific’s chest, each wave rising to drown this defeat.

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el cajon boulevard at moonrise

Ten-thirty tonight, alone in the left-turn lane by the liquor store. A blind veteran dozes in his wheelchair at the door. The night is thickly empty with the turn-signal, its solid, plastic toll.

I try to set my vision straight, but I can’t see the road kill on the streets tonight. The tide has rolled in over the asphalt and pooled blue and silent beneath my Goodyear tires. The sidewalk around the liquor store is blue-black littoral; a tide pool collects beneath the veteran’s wheelchair, a wave laps at the aluminum threshold. My hand reaches for your pack of cigarettes, but I find sand dollars scattered on the console instead.

The left-turn arrow turns, tourmaline.

I pull into my driveway, sending slow ripples across the neighbors’ impatiens; I fumble for my keys at my doorstep, where the water has risen ankle-deep, and in my bedroom where you were waiting, as I peel my socks off on the floor, you run your hands through my hair, bangs stiffened with sand and salt, and tell me that the tide will drain away in the morning, will funnel off the road in great torrents like a flood, but until then, we might as well take a dip.